Monday, April 12, 2004

Telegraph newspaper online RSS feeds

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a method of creating and distributing content, from publisher to reader. RSS is based on XML. An RSS feed offers a set of articles, each of which contain a headline, links, and an article summary. The publisher creates articles which are added to feeds dynamically. For example, when I post this web log entry, both the Blogger website and the RSS feed will be updated. RSS content can include web logs, community sites (e.g. Slashdot), news sites - basically any site that regularly updated content and wants to distribute those updates as discreete units. The reader can use an RSS reader program to obtain and display RSS feeds from publishers across the Internet (and intranet for that matter). I've been using using the FeedDemon as my RSS reader. If you are interested in a large set of feeds, take a look at Syndic8.com for a directory of over 10,000 publicly available RSS feeds.

A neat set of feeds are now available from the Daily Telegraph. This is cool in that I can get the key headlines into my RSS reader - and pretty much do away with hard copy news papers.

Today, this feed is free - but I can't help wondering if there isn't a way that the Daily Telegraph might be able to charge for some of this? Personally, I'd be happy to pay a small fee per article, say 1-2p.

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